INTRODUCTION
RIDDLES are, so to say, universal. Some are so widespread as to deserve the name of world-riddles. The same theme will appear in different places, at different times, with different treatment, either from a common origin scattered by oral or written transmission, or of spontaneous origin based on similar observation or similar mental processes.[1] Riddles appear in the Vedas and in the Koran. The Sphinx riddle is famous, and Homer is said to have died of vexation because he could not solve this one: “What we caught we threw away; what we could not catch we kept.”[2] Samson propounded one to the Philistines on a wager: “Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness” (Judg. 14:12–14). The Philistines lost, and no wonder. One of the best-known riddles involving a gamble occurs in the incest story of Apollonius of Tyre, related by Gower (Confessio Amantis viii, 271 ff.) and deplored by Chaucer.[3] (Our Riddle 46 is based on incest.)
Thus riddles exist on two levels, popular (oral) and literary (learned), often passing from one group to the other. For a folk riddle may be taken over by the learned and dressed accordingly, or vice versa, a learned riddle may pass to the folk and suffer modification to fit popular taste. Our Anglo-Saxon riddles illustrate both movements. No positive distinctions can be made, but in general the longer and more poetic may safely be called learned, notably the Storm riddles, but also for a different reason those containing runes; and
- ↑ For a rich collection illustrating comparative riddle lore, see Archer Taylor, English Riddles from Oral Transmission, Berkeley, 1951.
- ↑ The story is told in the Herodotean Life of Homer. The poet questioned some boys who had returned from fishing and was answered by the riddle. The answer is given in Symphosius 30, Pedunculus, ‘louse.’
- ↑ Apollonius asks for the hand of the daughter of the King of Antioch and is told that he must answer a riddle correctly or suffer death: “I have eaten my mother’s flesh and now I seek my father, her husband who is also my wife’s son.” This has had a long history before and since Gower and is familiar from Shakespeare’s Pericles (I, i, ll. 64–71). Another story in which a bride is won by answering a riddle is the ballad of Captain Wedderburn's Courtship (Child 46), which appears in literary form in Gozzi’s La Turandot, translated by Schiller, and set to music by Puccini. In Child 1 the devil threatens to carry off a maiden if she cannot answer his seven riddles.
